Sharing GIFs is a part of internet life these days, and Imgur is making GIF sharing even better with high-quality MP4 video in their new GIFV extension.

You can upload a large GIF file at 50MB and, after the GIFV conversion, get a file closer to 3.4MB. This optimizes GIFs for faster loading speeds, higher quality, and less bandwidth consumption (even on Imgur mobile). From the Imgur Blog:

Massively Increased Upload Limits: With the efficiencies introduced by MP4, Imgur is increasing its traditional GIF upload limit of 5MB by an order of magnitude to 50MB. This opens the door to massive improvements in quality. (Note: Original files over 20MB will not be available after upload)

Optimized for Social Channels: Uploads to Imgur will now fully animate on channels like Twitter and Facebook, allowing for the sharing of the full GIF experience throughout the social web.

The .GIFV Extension: With all these improvements, Imgur will now denote converted MP4s with a ".gifv" extension. The intention is to signal to users throughout the Internet that these links will feature a GIF experience that incorporates all the current and future enhancements made through Project GIFV. Imgur plans to submit an accompanying specification to relevant standards organizations before the end of the year.

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While Imgur is not the first to do something like this, it's still a really nice addition to one of the best image sharing sites out there. They make it a lot more accessible for everyone, so if you want to share a GIF, you may as well do it now through GIFV. The new extension doesn't quite embed everywhere, but it does in most places, like social networks.